There’s an article on CNN written by renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil who provides a list of five predictions about how technology will affect our future — and he provides specific timelines for each. I thought I’d throw it out to the ECW community for comment and discussion.
1. By the early 2020s, we will be able to prevent disease and aging by programming biology.
2.By 2030 all our energy needs will be able to be met by solar power — thus revolutionizing food production and making clean water abundantly available.
3.We will be printing a significant proportion of goods we used, and replacement organs, by the early 2020s
4.Search engines will be driven by natural language queries within five years.
5.We’ll be working and playing in virtual environments (including full immersion tactile experience) by the early 2020s
Those are the predictions, you can read his explanations and justifications at the CNN article here. Agree? Disagree? Have predictions of your own? I haven’t ever heard Kurzweil opine on the significance of LENR, and I wonder whether his predictions would be different if that were thrown into the equation. I would expect that he would be the kind of person who, if LENR becomes mainstream, would see it as a highly significant invention that could affect all the other technologies he discusses. I’d be interested to hear what ECWers think!
